Hanna Timmers makes talking about dying an experience at The Nut

There are quite a few deaths in art. Many books and television programmes start with a corpse, operas end with it, quite a few paintings drip with blood. All that death just has bitterly little to do with real death. With ‘For when you die’, theatre maker Hanna Timmers makes an attempt to make death less abstract. The performance, or ‘installation’, which she created with designer Gerbrand Bos for Het Nut, has been touring the Netherlands for a while now. On 11 November I was there in Het Klooster in Woerden and it was wonderful. 

Het Nut, that is the company around theatre-maker Greg Nottrot. From his home base on Utrecht's Berlinplein, he makes school with disarming performances in which he enters into conversation with his audience. Hanna Timmers also makes such ‘conversational theatre’, and so it has become a genre. It is theatre that makes the uncomfortable manageable. And what is more uncomfortable than death? 

Utterly strange

Yet, after a good fifteen minutes, you find yourself with a complete stranger giving words to the deepest emotions you felt at a recent or old death in your own environment. So the fact that you do so has to do with the openness of the maker and the atmosphere of trust that Hanna Timmers manages to create with it. It also happens in a small group of about 40 people that she gathers around a maquette full of drawers and miniatures of life fragments. It makes it safer. 

Timmers collected stories from people about the deaths in their lives. These are people as diverse as a hospital worker, a woman whose husband died unexpectedly of an overdose, a body washer, or a daughter. It's about grieving, about living through. She also compiled a list of 86 things you shouldn't - or should - say or do when grieving. 

Silent tour

Everything revolves around death being near every day. Something we prefer to leave unsaid in our daily lives. And so leaving that unsaid often leads to really uncomfortable things we say to each other, or do for each other. 

‘For when you die’ is experiencing a silent tour of small theatres, but can also be seen in bereavement centres. To avoid standing outside with old coffee and sticky cake afterwards, the makers themselves have provided mug cake. With a cup of comfort, or a hearty drink to go with it. 

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